Event Detail

Math Coffee - Rodney Keaton, Clemson

November 06, 2013 - 04:30 PM - 05:30 PM

Congruent Numbers, Elliptic Curves, and a Million Dollar Problem

with Rodney Keaton, Clemson University

One of the intriguing aspects of number theory lies in the ease with which problems can be stated, but how difficult a solution is to obtain. We will be interested in a problem of precisely this type, namely, the Congruent Number Problem. In this talk, we will introduce this problem which is well over a thousand years old and draw a link between it and modern number theory by way of elliptic curves.